All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  VIENNA WAS A DIFFERENT story. From the start, knowing that his posting was only temporary, he didn’t take the city or his job seriously. “It is a pleasant, happy-go-lucky, old-fashioned, good-natured and rather stupid town,” he wrote in a sketch he submitted to Putnam’s. From a diplomatic standpoint, the country as a whole did not command his respect, either. A year earlier, Prussia, under its king, Wilhelm, and prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, had prodded Austria into war and trounced it soundly. The once mighty Hapsburg Empire, under Emperor Franz Joseph, was now regarded as hapless, anachronistic, and marginalized. “Austria is perhaps next to Turkey in passivity and hopelessness,” Hay wrote dismissively.

  Vienna did have its diversions, however. “The great luxury is music,” Hay told Nicolay. He heard Strauss waltzes in the public gardens and saw the opera Faust from the box he inherited from Motley. One festival followed another throughout the summer, on which occasions, he noted, “the whole town shuts up shop and goes to the country” to eat, drink, and “lie on the grass . . . and let the world roll on.”

  His diary and letters make only passing reference to the work at hand, and evidently there was little. His fluency in German emboldened him to wander in directions he might have not gone otherwise—tramps in the mountains of the Tyrol and into the back streets of Vienna’s working-class neighborhoods, the most squalid of which, he judged, was the Jewish quarter.

  Thirty-six years later, in 1903, when Hay was secretary of state, he would take a public stand against the persecution of Jews abroad, his advocacy garnering him the widespread gratitude and respect of American Jewry. His posture at the time was somewhat unexpected, especially since so many of his friends were openly anti-Semitic—Henry Adams among the worst. Perhaps Hay merely suppressed his own bigotry, or, as seems more likely, he had outgrown it. Yet in Vienna in September 1867 there was no mistaking the revulsion he expressed toward life in the cul-de-sacs surrounding the Judenplatz.

  “I have never seen a decent person in those alleys or on those slippery stairs,” he wrote. “[E]verywhere [there are] stooping, dirty figures in long, patched and oily black gabardines of every conceivable material . . . covering the crouching creeping form from the round shoulders, to the splay shuffling feet. A battered soft felt hat crowns the oblique indolent crafty face, and what is most offensive of all, a pair of greasy curls dangle[s] in front of the pendulous ears. . . . In America we always say rich as a Jew, because even if a Jew is poor he is so brisk so sharp and enterprising that he is sure to make money eventually. But these slouching rascals are as idle as they are ugly.”

  His first impressions of Jews as a culture were not unlike the generalizations he had made of the enslaved Negroes he had observed in the South: a race apart, retrograde, removed from grace, and a dismally long way from assimilation into the mainstream.

  IN THE FALL, NICOLAY visited from Paris for several days. Afterward, Hay left Vienna on his own trip—to Krakow and Warsaw in Poland, then down the Danube to Budapest, and as far as Constantinople, returning by way of Trieste. At the first of the year, he went south to Italy, with stays in Rome and Venice. By the spring of 1868, he knew his interim as chargé d’affaires was nearing an end. “I have had a pleasant year of it,” he wrote to John Bigelow. “There is very little work to do at the Legation. I have sinned grievously against certain ten-day [leave] regulations. . . . I have drawn my salary with startling punctuality. I have not wearied the Home office with much despatches. My sleep is infantine & my appetite wolfish.”

  Yet he had not been entirely irresponsible, and his commentary on the declining authority of the Austrian aristocracy and the rise of liberalism was surely welcomed by Secretary Seward. His reports on the gestation of the new Austro-Hungarian Empire were likewise trenchant, and a letter he wrote to Seward in February 1868 was quite prescient on the shape of things to come. “The great calamity and danger of Europe today are those enormous armaments,” he observed. “No honest statesman can say that he sees in the present attitude of politics the necessity of war. No great Power is threatened. . . . Why then is the awful waste of youth and treasure continued? I believe from no other motive than to sustain the waning prestige of Kings.”

  His experience, first in Paris and now in Vienna, was paying off. Not only had he mastered the protocol of diplomacy; he was also drawing his own map of the world and developing his own sense of how foreign relations ought to be conducted. Already he observed the desperation of monarchies and foresaw the volatility of rampant nationalism when backed by modern weaponry—a dangerous combination that would vex the world into the next century.

  In Vienna, as in Paris, the more he saw of the Old World’s way of governance, the more he appreciated his own country’s methods. “It is curious and instructive to see these people starting off on the awkward walk of political babyhood,” he told John Bigelow. “Two years ago it was another Europe. . . . If ever, in my green and salad days, I sometimes vaguely doubted, I am safe now. I am a Republican till I die. When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps.”

  Due to the bitter political turmoil in Washington, the appointment of Hay’s replacement was slow in coming. In February, the House of Representatives had voted to impeach President Johnson—nominally for the rude manner in which he had attempted to fire Secretary of War Stanton—only to have the Senate acquit Johnson in May. In the meantime, the Vienna job was offered to a half-dozen men, including Horace Greeley, who turned it down. Finally in July, Henry Watts of Pennsylvania accepted the commission. Hay, who dubbed his successor “Wattshisname,” turned in his resignation and spent the rest of the summer at his leisure in the Tyrol and the Swiss Alps. Passing through London on the way home in October, he had little opportunity to see the sights, although he did chance to attend a lecture by one of his favorite authors, Charles Dickens.

  ONCE AGAIN HE RETURNED to Warsaw, and once again he did not stay long. By November he was back in Washington, “in peaceful pursuit of a fat office.” Ulysses S. Grant was the new president, but Hay’s patron, Seward, was leaving the State Department after the inauguration in March. Seward had nothing immediate to promise Hay. “I go back tonight to the West a broken down politician,” Hay joked mournfully to Nicolay in early December. Nicolay, too, was out of work and headed back to the United States with his wife and infant daughter.

  Hay was now thirty years old, with no dependents, few burdens, and time on his hands. He had friends in every city, it seemed, and he was well received wherever he went. A newspaper clipping in one of his scrapbooks chimed a typical welcome: “John Hay . . . invariably a good fellow, and always an immense favorite of the ladies, is in town, having returned from somewhere, and is looking as bright as a basket of chips, evidently being of that sort of hay which is made when the sun shines. . . . We do not know what he is doing, or what he wants; but the heart of power must be indeed obdurate which would refuse him anything he asked.”

  Left to his own devices, he tried his hand at lecturing. In late January 1869, he spoke to a large audience in Buffalo and then to a smaller one in Warsaw on “The Progress of Democracy in Europe,” tracing the movement, from the French Revolution through the reversals of the Second Empire to the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War. “He is severe upon Louis Napoleon; he doesn’t like Bismarck,” wrote one reviewer. On sum, though, “Mr. Hay is hopeful for Democracy in Europe.” The review lavished equal praise on his delivery—“a good voice, a fine elocution”—and on his intellect—“versatile, polished, brilliant.”

  By spring, he was in Washington once again, courting the Grant administration and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. He knew the drill by heart, and he was somewhat chagrined to be joining the very throng of favor-seekers he had once deprecated. “You will find Washington intolerable,” he warned Nicolay in mid-May. “I have been here one day. I am quite sure that by hanging around and eating dirt I could get some office. But my stomach revolts. It is almost too great a strain of a man’s self-respect to ask for an offic
e: still worse to beg for it.”

  Instead, he found a job as editor of the Illinois State Journal, a Republican paper in Springfield. “He is a bright, handsome young fellow, full of talent and possessed of a vast deal of tact,” a rival newspaper commented. “If he makes as much impression upon Western readers as he did upon Washington ladies he will make himself felt as a journalist.”

  His plan was to edit the newspaper and write for magazines on the side. The Atlantic Monthly had recently bought his in-depth account of the attack and murder of Joseph Smith by the Warsaw militia. But $100 every now and again for his freelance work was not enough; nor did it compensate for the drudgery and meager pay of the Illinois State Journal. He lasted there only a month.

  In mid-June, he was offered the position of secretary of legation in Madrid. After the White House, Paris, and Vienna, to accept another commission as secretary of legation, at such a modest salary, was an admission, if not of defeat, then of desperation. Seward had warned him about the pitfalls of low-level patronage. The salary was his smallest so far: $1,800 a year. But Hay had no better plan.

  All the same, there were intriguing reasons for going to Madrid. One was the minister under whom he would serve: General Daniel Sickles, one of the most renowned swashbucklers of his day. Another was the political situation in Spain: a year earlier a democratic revolt had dethroned Queen Isabella II, and in June, just as Hay was offered his job, the Spanish Cortes, or parliament, enacted a constitution providing universal suffrage (for men) and greater civil rights. “I have determined, malgré my better judgment, to go to Spain for a little while,” he wrote John Bigelow. “I have read and thought a good deal about revolutions, and I cannot resist an opportunity so favorable of lifting the very pot lid and seeing the ‘hellbroth seeth and bubble.’ ” The Progress of Democracy in Europe was opening a brand new chapter.

  Hay knew Daniel Sickles, as did nearly everybody in America. He had served as a secretary to the U.S. legation in London and in the U.S. Congress. He had been censured for escorting a prostitute into the chambers of the New York assembly and, on a trip to London, was said to have introduced her to Queen Victoria. Then in 1859, he killed Philip Barton Key, son of the composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Key, the district attorney of Washington, was having an affair with Sickles’s wife when Sickles shot him down in broad daylight in Lafayette Square, across from the White House. He won acquittal on grounds of temporary insanity. In the Civil War, he quickly rose from colonel to general, thanks mainly to his friendship with General Joseph Hooker.

  Sickles’s performance at Gettysburg renewed his notoriety. At Cemetery Ridge he defied the order of General Meade to hold his troops in a defensive position, instead ordering it forward and unduly exposing it to a devastating fire that hacked its ranks from ten thousand to six thousand before it could get into the fight. Had he not lost his leg to a Confederate cannonball, he might well have been court-martialed. After the war, he made himself useful by commanding Reconstruction efforts in the South and by displeasing Andrew Johnson. For these last services, Grant sent him to Spain.

  Sickles, in many ways, was just the man for the post. He was battle-tested, as his uniform and crutches made plain; he was an inveterate intriguer; and at forty-nine, despite his missing leg, he was yet dashing and virile. He would need all of his talents to fulfill the instructions he carried from President Grant by way of Secretary of State Fish: to broker a deal for Cuba.

  For the past year, Cuba had been in revolt, seeking to shake free of the dictatorial grip of the Spanish Empire. The United States proposed that Cuba be allowed to buy its independence, with the United States guaranteeing the payments. The American goal, of course, was to gain possession of the country that produced one third of the world’s sugar. With the Spanish government virtually bankrupt, the time seemed opportune. But to achieve his delicate mission, Sickles first had to navigate the confounding chaos of four or more political parties plotting and rioting to seize control of a newly forged but scarcely tempered constitutional monarchy, which, at the moment, was without a monarch.

  John Hay’s time in Spain was not unlike his years in Paris and Vienna. He was at once engaged and aloof—part envoy, part journalist. On the strength of the Mormon article, Atlantic Monthly assistant editor William Dean Howells told him he would welcome pieces from Spain. The first appeared before Hay left the country in the summer of 1870, and they would soon be collected in Castilian Days, his first book.

  As much as he denounced Madrid as “cheerless and bare,” it was nonetheless an ideal subject for portraiture. As secretary of legation, he had a box seat on the grand drama of a nation in the throes of shedding “the twin despotism” of church and crown and claiming “its rightful inheritance of modern freedom and progress.” His commentary was characteristically mordant, more so as his Spanish improved.

  He was aided by his friendship with Emilio Castelar, a history professor who had fled to France after a failed revolt in 1866 and then returned in 1868 as the most outspoken champion of republicanism. Castelar, like Hay, spoke French and took the American secretary into his confidence, educating him on the nuances of Spanish society and the inflections of national debate. Hay regularly attended sessions of the Cortes and was mesmerized by Castelar’s oratory, even if he could not understand all he heard. “I have never imagined such fluency of speech,” Hay wrote in his diary. “He never says a foolish or careless word. All history is at his fingers’ ends.”

  Hay shared Castelar’s vision of a government progressing steadily, if fitfully, toward full democracy. What held Spain back, Hay came to recognize, was “blind reverence for things that have been.” He ridiculed the Catholic Church and its fixation on “knuckle-bones of apostles and splinters of true crosses.” He decried dueling as “the lack of modern civilization.” He attended bullfights but was not amused. He was charmed by the “tender melody” of the Castilian tongue but remarked to John Bigelow that the Spaniards “retain the speech of Don Quixote, but the heart and stomach of Sancho’s.”

  He made exception for the grand tradition of Spanish fine arts, as represented in the galleries of the Prado. He was entirely enchanted by Diego Velásquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, a seventeenth-century portrait of the daughter of King Philip IV and her attendants. “The longer you look upon this marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely the placing of color on canvas,” he observed. “If art consists in making a fleeting moment immortal, if the True is a higher ideal than the Beautiful, then it will be hard to find a greater painting than this.”

  After only a few months in Madrid, it became obvious to Hay, as well as to Sickles, that General Juan Prim, president of the latest Spanish government, dared not consummate the cession of Cuba for fear of incurring the wrath of rival factions within Spain and other monarchies throughout Europe. “The Spanish people are too ignorant to see their empire in America is really at an end,” Hay told his father. Writing to Bigelow, he declared, “If we want the Island we must go there and take it.” Twenty-eight years later, when Hay was serving as ambassador to England, the United States would do precisely as he had suggested.

  But as frustrated as he was by the Cuba impasse, he did not flag in his optimism for the future of the Spanish republic. “[A] new and beneficent spirit has begun to influence the political life of Spain,” he prophesied. “Its voice rings out in the Cortes in strains of lyric beauty that are only heard in the fresh and dewy dawn of democracies. The day that is coming is not to be tranquil and cloudless. . . . There will be bloodshed and treasons and failures enough to discourage and appall the faint-hearted. But . . . the shadow will go forward on the dial. . . . Spain, the latest call of the nations of Europe, is not condemned to everlasting punishment for the crimes of her kings and priesthood.”

  Hay did not stay long at the legation. The failure of the Cuba negotiations, and the Grant administration’s unhappiness with Spain’s treatment of Cubans and of the American filibusterers who
were aiding them, made relations with the Spanish authority increasingly testy. And while he developed a dour appreciation of “Españolismo,” he confessed that he “never felt so thoroughly out of the world before.”

  Another reason to leave was the lack of suitable female companionship. He complained that few Americans, especially American women, came through Madrid. And not all those who did met with his approval. To one female visitor from New York, whose name is unrecorded, he wrote: “You have beauty enough to be a first rate belle, if you had less wit. . . . You are witty, but you are not hearty and cordial. Your wit is as cold as an icicle.” As for Spanish women, he found them “built on the old-fashioned generous plan.” What they offered in form they lacked in substance: “They know a little music and a little French, but they have never crossed, even in a school-day excursion, the border line of the ologies.”

  The one lasting friendship he did forge was with Sickles’s personal secretary, Alvey Adee, who would prove to be one of the most remarkable men in Hay’s lifetime circle of colleagues. Alvey Augustus Adee was four years Hay’s junior, trim, sandy-haired, and “chipper as a mudlark.” The son of a naval surgeon, he was tutored at home and then trained as a civil engineer. He had an abiding curiosity for the workings of the world and had spent a year touring Europe. Like Hay, he had a knack for languages, an aptitude made more remarkable by the fact that Adee was quite nearly deaf—although, as a reporter noted some years later, “It seems to be a peculiar sort of deafness that enables him to hear what he cares to hear and to remain oblivious to things that annoy or bore him.”